For many people this time of the year is the most depressing.  I know it has been so for me for a long time.  However, I am determined that THIS year I will work towards a more positive and happy attitude. 

     I will remember to make myself feel happier.  Smile and the world smiles with you, it is true.  When you wear a smile, people tend to smile back.  Once they’ve smiled at you they will smile at the next person they meet and so on.  Pass along a smile today.  It’s uplifting and such a small thing to do.

     I will listen to others.  Everyone needs to talk but finding a willing ear to bend is often a problem.  How was your day?  I’m listening.

     I will take time to play.  Yes, I said play.  Everyone should play.  Bring out that inner child and let him/her have some fun. 

      Hmm, there’s still one big, fluffy pile of leaves in the yard I think it’s time I joined the dogs in a good dive in the leaves.

Left hand rested on the right, pointing ahead over your own, you throw body in a dive, pushed off at the legs, quickly tucked into a curl, into a ball before you SPLASH! hit the surface with a crackle, with a crunch, sending fiery waves crashing over the curb, flooding on the sidewalk. You could have incited a brushfire if you’d cast away your cigarette closer, but perhaps today’s your day.

“WATCH OUT FOR THE…pavement…,” she starts to shout with a wince, then she looks away when you make impact. “…or that homeless guy,” she quips when she returns her sight to you. She watches you swim with a look between endearment and embarrassment and ignores the crinkling cacophony you’ve made of the previously still autumn air.

“C’mon in!” you cry out. “It’s a beautiful night!” and she raises her left eyebrow in that incredulous way you find so irresistibly alluring.

“I’m pretty sure you’re swimming in hobo piss,” she counters straight-faced as you back stroke through the leaves. You stop, you shrug, you smirk and you keep swimming.

And you stop. Stuck. Frozen. Petrified like prehistoric insects trapped in amber. A look of sheer panic washes across your face. She thinks you’re kidding for a moment but you freeze your breath and suddenly it’s serious.

“…”

“What’s wrong?”

“I think I’m stuck,” and that frog in your throat snaps and croaks when you exhale.

She quickly looks around, confirms there’s no one else in the park, and offers her hand. “I told you to watch out for those creepy crazy homeless guys. They’re ever being homeless—everywhere that’s not a home, I guess.”

She shrieks only briefly through that bright, startling smile when you pull her to the ground and she thrashes through the leaf pile for a moment like the victim of a shark attack before that gorgeous laughter overcomes her and she breathes again.

“Now I’m caked in hobo piss. Thanks for that,” she groans, her eyes rolling into the ethereal arch of a brilliant crescent moon.

“Don’t blame me,” you say and stroke her hair behind her ear. “You don’t often get to float on dead clouds.”

cesta

CESTA Tabor cz republiki… November 4 2008
“ punk rock” reminds me….. reminds me of who I am… where I have been…  it has quite literally, saved my life again and again….i guess that maybe that makes me a cliche?  It puts my feet on the ground.. like running a long way or the smell of cigarettes, wearing my favorite boots or waking up at 6 am to leave a romantic surprise on a friends doorstep.. it comforts my broken heart…, its sweet and tough at the same time. I am feeling this as a not so dull thud and rumble comes up thru the floorboards from the rehearsal space in the basement. I like the way it smells, tastes, tickles..  the way it feels like community… a little dust vibrates off the kitchen cabinet and floats in the fading autumn sunlight coming in thru the window…. one   two    three     four….. and a muted glorious din washes over me..  the spoon in my coffee cup rattles…  the bass is planting me to the floor while the guitars are like bats squealing all around…. .. warm and familiar..
The fall has always been my favorite season, ever since I was little and making giant leaf piles in new york with my sister. We would bury each other and giggle for hours. There, under the damp smell of earth and the crunching of oak leaves we felt safe for a while… a place that was ours and secret, where grownups couldn’t touch us…. burying ourselves from the world, we disappeared together…

I found an old key in the garden at cesta while I was weeding one summer. I was told at the time that it was a “gypsy key” as a lot of “gypsies” used to squat this house. A neighbor said “it may be cursed”… more Roma bashing and fear I thought at the time. I knew the key would protect me from harm and it became my touchstone for the next two years. I put it on a black string and wore it around my neck… I never took it off. Then one day, it disappeared, I had gotten so used to it being on around my neck that I didn’t notice at first. I panicked thinking that something terrible was about to happen… and then I realized that maybe the key had just moved on, maybe to another garden to lie in the damp earth, to disappear… until another gardener found her and they would also travel together for a little while.

The farther “east” I go in my wandering the more I see the borders dissolving into sameness…. The physical borders disappear in europe as e.u membership grows … while global markets and western cultural imperialism grows and brings Serbia  “to GO coffee” and the cz republik  another cat food commercial… it reminds me of a beautiful record cover by one of my favorite anarcho noise/ punk bands from Holland   “The Ex”. It’s a photo of them in some European city on the main “Old Town” shopping street, the view above them and all around, as far as you can see, are the corporate logos of businesses we all recognize.. you know the ones. The Ex themselves are camping in the middle of the square, they have pitched a tent, with a stove, a pick ax for climbing, a sledge hammer, map, compass, guidebook, a camera.. …they look lost, searching. The shoppers are ignoring them and passing by as if it’s a normal sight.